Chicago`s Assyrians Fear Relatives In Iraq May Suffer Kurds` Fate

March 29, 1992|By Stephen Franklin.

They call Homer Ashurian with endless worries.

My relatives are hungry and cold, they say. They may be driven from refugee camps in Turkey. They may be crushed as Iraq`s army swats the Kurds in northern Iraq. They fear for their future. They don`t have a future.

``They cry, and they want us to help, but . . . what can we do?``

wondered Ashurian, a well-mannered man who once was a legislator in Iran.

While others may have forgotten the Persian Gulf war, telephone calls pour in to the Assyrian Universal Alliance Foundation, where Ashurian works because many of the 60,000 Assyrians in the Chicago area still feel the war`s pains.

And they are especially frustrated because they feel Westerners know little about them and do not realize how the war altered the fate of a small group buried long ago in the labyrinth of Middle Eastern history.

``Whenever people talk about the refugees, they ignore the fact that we exist. Nobody ever mentions the Assyrians,`` said former state Sen. John Nimrod, who works beside Ashurian at the group`s Chicago office in the Rogers Park neighborhood.

The Assyrians are Christians from a kingdom that collapsed 2,700 years ago in Mesopotamia, which is located in modern-day Iraq.

They speak Syriac, an ancient Semitic tongue that sounds closer to Hebrew than Arabic, and they insist they are not Arabs.

Outside of Iraq, which has about 200,000 Assyrians, the Chicago area has the largest gathering of Assyrians. There are also 40,000 Chaldeans in the Detroit area. Chaldeans are Iraqi Christians who follow the Vatican, and not the Eastern Orthodox Church as the Assyrians do.

Altogether, Iraq had about 600,000 Christians before the gulf war.

As Iraqi repression intensified during the war, thousands of Iraqi Christians-Assyrians and Chaldeans-fled north with the Kurds. At least 90,000 remain in the fragile self-declared zone in the north among 3.8 million Kurds, where Saddam Hussein has imposed a debilitating economic blockade.

The United Nations High Commission for Refugees, the main relief agency in the area, is due to pull out of the region in April, and the allied military observers are expected to follow in June.

In their wake, the Kurdish, Assyrian and other militias are not considered a match for Iraq`s army, nor, experts add, do they have the economic resources to hold out for long against the Iraqi blockade.

Several thousand refugees also live in Turkey, mostly restricted to refugee camps, according to relief officials and Assyrian leaders.

Other Iraqi Christians are scattered from Jordan to Cyprus, living on whatever money they took from Iraq and sustained by hopes that relatives will find them a new home outside the Middle East.

The most pressing problem is in Turkey, where the government is not eager to see the 10,000 Iraqi war refugees settle.

Turkey says that it is still saddled with several thousand Iraqis who escaped in 1988 after Iraq attacked and destroyed 4,000 Kurdish and Assyrian villages.

Turkey was forcibly returning the most recent refugees to Iraq until Western diplomats and relief organizations urged it to wait and allow the U.S. and others to resettle some of them.

The Turkish government agreed, however, to wait only until April 29, said Shepard Loman of the U.S. Catholic Conference.

The U.S. is not likely to absorb many of these refugees, State Department officials say. At most the U.S. will accept about 1,500 Iraqi refugees from Turkey, about one-third of them Christians, officials say.

Nor is the U.S. likely to come to the rescue of Assyrians stranded elsewhere in the Middle East, because the government is relying on the UN refugee commission`s view that the Assyrians do not deserve special refugee status.

``There is no evidence that the Iraqi government has targeted the Assyrians as a group,`` said Vickey Butler, a UN refugee official in Washington.

But the Assyrians tell a different story.

They deny claims of being a comfortable minority with representatives in the government like Tariq Aziz, a Chaldean, who is Iraq`s deputy prime minister.

They add that they are forbidden to speak their language in Iraq and are targets for government retaliation because they refuse to take Arabic names.

When the government attacked the Kurds in 1988, the army destroyed about 300 Assyrian villages in the same region, they say.

``The Christians are not welcome now in Iraq,`` claimed Rev. Immanuel Rayes, a Chaldean priest from Detroit, who visited Iraqi refugee camps in Turkey last winter.

``They, the Iraqi people, they say you are a Westerner, you are for Bush, so go to Bush to feed you,` `` he recalled refugees telling him.